About Me

Recovering academic, blogger-back-from-the-dead, and one-year veteran of the workforce. Now an organizational embed, with lessons learned from the trenches and stories to tell. All with a not-so-slightly academic twist.

Saturday, December 08, 2007

Saturday Poetry: Fall Into Warmth

Readers, today I love the world and all the people in it. My heart is so enlargened by this atypical love for humanity that doctors think I will die. Apparently, the normal state of misanthropy and cynicism is better for my health, as it keeps my heart small and miserly efficient, the laws of thermodynamics being what they are.

I love the world today because I ran six miles today in 37-40 F, am currently listening to George Strait, and just ate leftover Indian food, and am not at the library. It is remarkable how attending to your physical needs makes you feel alive again, such that you no longer wish that everyone else was dead.

This current fallow period sucks. It is cold; I don't have anything to eat besides oatmeal, turkey sandwiches and leftover chicken soup, all of which I now can't stand; I visit my house more than I live in it; I hardly see any of my friends and loved ones--this is what happens twice a year.

So it's nice when your projects are going, if not well, then at least in some direction; when you feel nourished; when you see someone you want to see; when you do something you love that's good for you (tomorrow: I hike); and when the cold is bearable because at least in one part of the house, it is warm, and the warmth suffuses through you like a George Strait love song. Even I, with my anemic poor circulation such that my hands and feet are always icy, currently have rose-tinged tips, like an e.e. cummings poem.

It is not yet winter, but it is close enough to justify mugs of tea and cocoa, and warm cookies. Come in from the cold.

Autumnby John Clare

The thistledown's flying, though the winds are all still,On the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill,The spring from the fountain now boils like a pot;Through stones past the counting it bubbles red-hot.

The ground parched and cracked is like overbaked bread,The greensward all wracked is, bents dried up and dead.The fallow fields glitter like water indeed,And gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed.

Hill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun,And the rivers we're eying burn to gold as they run;Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.

The Beautiful Changesby Richard Wilbur

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sidesThe Queen Anne’s Lace lying like liliesOn water; it glidesSo from the walker, it turnsDry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of youValleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changedBy a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;As a mantis, arrangedOn a green leaf, growsInto it, makes the leaf leafier, and provesAny greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that saysThey are not only yours; the beautiful changesIn such kind ways,Wishing ever to sunderThings and things’ selves for a second finding, to loseFor a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

In Novemberby Lisel Mueller

Outside the house the wind is howlingand the trees are creaking horribly.This is an old storywith its old beginning,as I lay me down to sleep.But when I wake up, sunlighthas taken over the room.You have already made the coffeeand the radio brings us musicfrom a confident age. In the paperbad news is set in distant places.Whatever was bound to happenin my story did not happen.But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.Perhaps a name was changed.A small mistake. Perhapsa woman I do not knowis facing the day with the heavy heartthat, by all rights, should have been mine.

Everything that Acts Is Actualby Denise Levertov

From the tawny lightfrom the rainy nightsfrom the imagination findingitself and more than itselfalone and more than aloneat the bottom of the well where the moon lives,can you pull me

into December? a lowlandof space, perception of spacetowering of shadows of clouds blown uponclouds overnew ground, new madeunder heavy December footsteps? the onlyway to live?

The flawed moonacts on the truth, and makesan autumn of tentativesilences.You lived, but somewhere else,your presence touched others, ring upon ring,and changed. Did you thinkI would not change?

The black moonturns away, its work done. A tenderness,unspoken autumn.We are faithfulonly to the imagination. What theimaginationseizesas beauty must be truth. What holds youto what you see of me isthat grasp alone.